Another application: Why are empirical methods so arcane? Not necessarily because they grant us huge new insights, but because **institutionalized science has adversarial incentives** in a way that firms (mostly) don't. https://t.co/DxDvmVCDdQ
— Cameron Harwick 👾🏛 (@C_Harwick) June 24, 2022
I think about this a lot. I’m not a statistics expert, but a lot of tools (both software and mathematical) in statistics are 1000x harder than they need to be, to produce only 5% better results, with higher mistake rates because they are so difficult to use. I don’t think this has a thing to do with better science, but rather an arms race within the field to weed out those who won’t devote ridiculous hours and efforts to competing within that field.
A lot of fields are like this (mine included).